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Susan Wise Bauer wrote the book "Well Educated Mind" as a guide to the Classical Education you never had. Part one covers Training Your Own Mind, The Act of Reading, Keeping a Journal, and Final Preparations for beginning to read. She outlines how to read a book from the standpoint of the grammar, logic and rhetoric stages plus how to read, think and formulate your opinion of what the story means to you. She recommends keeping a journal and outlining the story as you read. Which is actually an excellent idea. There have been too many times a passage has struck me or provided an epiphany. In the case where I didn't write it down right away, either using marginalia or a notebook, I've discovered that in going back later, it doesn't affect me the same way. So my advice to you is write it down as soon as the thought crosses your mind or you will lose it forever.

Part two is all about the books and her suggestions of great books to read from 5 genres: Fiction, Autobiography, History/Politics, Drama and Poetry. The books are listed chronologically and she suggests reading them in order. The genres are broken down into 5 sections with a detailed explanation how to read them and a synopsis is included on each title with the best edition to read.As of 2016A revised edition of Well Educated Mind has been released and Susan has expanded the sections to include books from the twenty first century, added movie versions of the plays, more poets after the Modernists for Poetry as well as a new Science section. I read the revised version and received a much needed refresher in active reading. I heartily recommend the updated and expanded edition. Check out her website for additional recommended editions and links to public domain texts.

Please join me in this perpetual challenge. The goal of the perpetual challenge is to read at least 3 books in any category, each year. Listed are the suggestions in each category.

Fiction:

Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes

The Pilgrim's Progress -John Bunyan

Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe

Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy

The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James

Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Wolfe

The Trial - Franz Kafka

Native Son - Richard Wright

The Stranger - Albert Camus

1984 - George Orwell

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

Seize the Day - Saul Bellow

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If on a winter's night a traveler - Italo Calvino

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

White Noise - Don DeLillo

Possession - A.S. Byatt

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

Autobiography

Augustine - The Confessions

Margery Kempe - The Book of Margery Kempe

Michel De Montaigne - Essays

Teresa Of Avila - The Life of Saint Teresa of Avila by Herself

Rene Descartes - Meditations

John Bunyan - Grace Abounding in the Chief of Sinners

Mary Rowlandson - The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration

Jean Jacques Rousseau - Confessions

Benjamin Franklin - The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

Frederick Douglass - Life and Times of Frederick Douglas

Henry David Thoreau - Walden

Harriet Jacobs - Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself

Booker T. Washington - Up from Slavery

Friedrich Nietzsche - Ecce Homo

Adolf Hitler - Mein Kampf

Mohandas Gandhi - An Autobiography: The Story of my Experiments with Truth

Gertrude Stein - Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Thomas Merton - Seven Storey Mountain

C.S. Lewis - Surprised by Joy: the Shape of my Early Life

Malcolm X - The Autobiography of Malcolm X

Maya Angelou - I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

May Sarton - Journal of a Solitude

Aleskandr Solzhenitsyn - The Gulag Archipelago

Charles W. Colson - Born Again

Richard Rodriguez - Hunger of Memory: Education of Richard Rodriguez

Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain

Elie Wiesel - All Rivers Run to the Sea

History/Politics

Herodotus - The Histories

Thucydides - The Peloponnesian War

Plato - The Republic

Plutarch - Lives

Augustine - The City of God

Bede - The Ecclesiastical History of the English People

Niccolo Machiavelli - The Prince

Sir Thomas More - Utopia

John Locke - The True End of Civil Government

David Hume - The History of England, Volume V

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - The Social Contract

Thomas Paine - Common Sense

Edward Gibbon - The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire